EDITORIAL RECLASSIFICATION TITLE 34, UNITED STATES CODE

BRIEF SUMMARY OF CHANGES

In 2017, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel reorganized certain existing provisions of the United States Code into a new Title 34, Crime Control and Law Enforcement. No statutory text was repealed or amended in the reorganization. The reorganization was implemented in the online version of the Code on September 1, 2017, and it will be reflected in the printed version of the Code in Supplement V of the 2012 Edition.

BACKGROUND AND NEED FOR CHANGE

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel is responsible for maintaining and publishing the United States Code, which is a codification of the general and permanent laws of the United States organized into titles based on subject matter. An integral part of producing the United States Code is determining where new laws should be placed, a process known as classification.

Classification is a challenging task because new law must be classified not only to fit logically within existing Code categories, but also to allow room for future development. Over time, due to the enactment of new laws and amendments, some areas of the Code become less organized and harder to navigate.

The impetus for the title 34 project was to gather in one title the growing body of law bearing on crime control and law enforcement. Those provisions were previously scattered in various parts of the United States Code. Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, and Title 28, Judiciary and Judicial Procedure (which contains Part II, Department of Justice), are positive-law titles of the Code that bear on crime and law enforcement. However, beginning in the 1960s, a number of laws have been passed relating to crime control and law enforcement programs or activities in which the Attorney General or the Department of Justice (or one of its components) have been given primary responsibility, and which have not been enacted as part of either Title 18 or Title 28. Those newer crime control provisions, such as the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 (Pub. L. 89-197), the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-351), the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (Pub. L. 93-415), the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-322), and other laws, were classified to various places (including entire chapters) in Title 42, The Public Health and Welfare, which is an enormous title containing a hodge-podge of various provisions. A smaller number of them were classified as statutory notes under sections of Titles 18 or 28.

Title 34 was created to provide a place in the Code where those provisions, as well as future provisions related to crime control and law enforcement, could be better organized and maintained. The reorganization did not include provisions that were better retained in their current locations in the Code as part of the coverage of the following subjects:

National defense matters (classified to Title 50, War and National Defense)

MAJOR ACTIONS AND STATUS

November 14, 2017.—The Office of the Law Revision Counsel completed, and submitted to the House Committee on the Judiciary for introduction in the 115th Congress, a draft bill to make technical amendments to update statutory references to provisions reclassified to title 34, United States Code.

March 19, 2018.—H.R. 5335 (115th Congress) was introduced and referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.